Sprout Magazine

Starcraft II Arcade Reviews: Special Forces Elite Shared Income Version

Starcraft II is the sequel to the incredibly popular Starcraft. It was released in 2010. It is an RTS (Real Time Strategy) game that is one of the best known in the world. What a lot of people who don’t play the game don’t know is that it contains an arcade area where people can create their own games and put them up for others to play. This of course, leads to a lot of interesting games and a lot of fun. An interesting game that came out recently is Special Forces Elite Shared Income Version.

Special Forces Elite Shared Income Version is a game where you fight off infinite hordes of zerg with several other players. Each player chooses a hero. Each hero is a very powerful unit that you use to kill enemies and destroy spawning buildings. As you do, the enemies you fight become stronger. You gain resources by killing enemies.

There are a lot of heroes to choose from, and they each provide a rewarding play experience. I personally enjoyed playing as the Firebat, called the Pyromaster. He does (as I’m sure you guessed) splash damage, and has a lot of health and armor, making him difficult to kill. The two abilites I used the most were slowing all enemies in a radius around me, and throwing a grenade that caused a lot of damage in an area.

Aside from controlling your hero, you can also call down troops and build turrets. These will help a lot when you get to the later phases of the game. Having more guns means you can take down enemies faster, which becomes a necessity when there are hundreds of them and they all have thousands of health. The other thing you use your resources for is to buy upgrades. Upgrades are extremely important, as they allow you to compete with the upgraded enemies. You can upgrade your hero, as well as the units you buy. The four main upgrades are health, energy, fire rate, and damage.

Things start getting ridiculous very quickly in this game. As the enemy evolve they get bigger and bigger, until they’re so huge you can’t really tell what’s going on. If you have a weaker computer, you will probably start lagging at this point. I’ve found that the game is incredibly fun in the beginning when you can run around and do whatever you want pretty much and slaughter hordes of zerglings, etc. It’s once you get farther in the game that things turn from epic and fun to just downright ridiculous. Still, I’d play it over and over just for the beginning.